Some insight into the verse in Diamond Sutra

At times, I am amazed by the behavior of my brain, or I should say "the human's brain", which generally speaking wanders all the time, wanders on everything and anything. Even the entity of the individual that accommodates it has no control over it. You can not make it stop thinking about a certain thing, it just keeps going on that wandering mode till you get a moment of sudden and temporary awakening. When you want it to focus on a certain matter, it wanders to totally irrelevant ones. I have found this behavior of our brain, heart, or mind as many fellow Buddhists prefer call it, is consistently true as I am getting older. Especially its wandering behavior is the target I aim to attain some skill through my daily dawn meditation practice to tame it down.

The verse found in the ending part of the Diamond Sutra is so renowned not only do Buddhists of whatever tradition they are in, everyone can easily recite it, even people outside of the religion refer to it when certain situation emerges and constantly changing its format as time goes by, the meaning of that verse tinged in their mind convincing them it is exactly right, all the things that are conceivable are meant to change or evolve.

There are quite a lot of interpretations in the internet trying to set a conclusion to define the essence of the Diamond Sutra. My father-in-law was one of the innumerable enthusiasts who duplicated several copies of the Sutra during his last few years by hand writing as a way of mindfulness practice and gave to each of his 4 son-in-laws as a blessing. The image I selected as a theme picture of this post shown above is his calligraphical work. He ever said to me when he had finished his first read of the sutra sometime in 1985, "the main point of the Diamond Sutra is on the importance of remaining detached from everything and anything to attain an eternal happiness".

I was then an illiterate of Buddhism sutras. I found them tasteless, meaningless,
and of no interest to me at all, not only so, many of the statements are of paradoxical, however, my father-in-law's comment about Diamond Sutra had planted a seed of  my studying it later on and eventually writing this post.

I believe the Buddha, throughout his life time on our planet, had been sticking to his vow of awaking us, the sentient beings, with his teaching. Every time when his disciple asked a question, he would patiently explained his teachings thoroughly, and usually concluded the session with a 4 line verse. The one in Diamond Sutra goes like this:

• all of the worldly matters
• are like dream, delusion, bubble and shadow
• they transform like the dew and thunder
• they should be viewed as such 

This famous verse is not difficult to understand in terms of their word meaning. They make sense; are logical from our view as a human being. But we should not forget that the Buddha's view is very much different from ours, he knew the best way to make his disciples understand the most of what he tried to teach by human's language is for them to experience it by themselves. Therefore, the meaning behind the 4 statements must have lost a lot of that was in Buddha's brain when he spoke it. The comparison on the interpretations of the verse between Buddha and his audiences can be understood by a fable wrote by an ancient Chinese philosopher, Zhuang Zi, who lived around the 4th century BC.

A frog lived in a well came across a turtle from the ocean. They had a conversation on the topic of the greatness of their respective living spaces. The frog could not believe there was such great place the turtle lived and did not even understand what the turtle had depicted about the ocean. (for reading the detailed story please click here.)

That means we, just like the frog living in the well, believe we are the most supreme intelligent species on the earth. We are taught so by our worldly education, As we are growing older and turning into elderly stage of life, we have experienced a lot of inexplicable things happening around us at different stages along our life time. These experiences are processed, stored and finally we are able to analyse the experiences and generalize all the stored experiences by a formula. Like the frog lived in the well inevitably developed a strong ego which is unbeatable and stubbornly get in the way of our path toward enlightenment. No wonder we all understand the theory as per the verse says, but most of us found their practice did not bring much progress for them.

The main content of the Diamond sutra is the conversation between Buddha and his student, Subhuti. The answers given by  the Buddha to Subhuti are all of paradoxical. However, Subhuti's response was like that he appreciated what his teacher was telling him. My understanding about this unique answering way is that the teacher was conveying the fact of the nature of anything conceivable, emptiness. Emptiness nature of anything is indescribable; is something we can only feel or experience in our mind. If we really want to get a solid answer based on our language out of it, then it becomes limitlessly vast, bigger than the biggest, smaller then the invisible. It is an idea of whatever, not wrong and not right; non-exist and ubiquitous; noble and nasty, and whatever you term it you can sense its nature is somewhere in between and is somewhere beyond.

Because the Dharma is in the nature of emptiness, so it can be at any point of the realm or it is beyond the limit of the extreme. When things possess this nature of quality, it is in constant transforming as well, and to one who has enlightened there is nothing without the nature of emptiness.

So my insight into the 4 line verse is that I found Buddha brought his conversation with Subhuti to a hault and set out the 4 lines of statement as his conclusion or summary of what he had answered to Subhuti. The verse is not paradoxical. This looks to me that Buddha thought, "sentient beings must have been confused by all the self-contradictory statements of my teachings on Subhuti's questions, now I should give them a more understandable summary about what I have just said". And so the verse goes as mentioned above.

This is my insight into the 4 line verse of Diamond Sutra.



--The End--